Media recording capabilities, such as photographing and video recording, have been integrated with remarkable regularity in a score of common, everyday devices. The ubiquity of such media recording capabilities has prompted a growing demand for media applications. In particular, users are interested in applications to access media stored on different devices and to share media with other users. The Internet has further fueled the demand for media applications by greatly expanding the amount of media available to users and providing an ever-widening audience for conveniently sharing media.
Numerous browser-based tools and client applications have emerged that allow users to share and access media from any Internet-connected device. For example, image search engines allow users to search the Web for image content and browse the searched photos through a web browser. Other browser-based tools and services, such as social networking sites, similarly allow users to view and share photos through a web browser. Similar functionality also exists in native client applications.
Given the wide availability of media, users can typically access media files stored across multiple interfaces, such as a web interface and a desktop interface, from one or more user devices. To make sense of the numerous media files, users can create albums to organize and view groups of media files based on shared characteristics. For example, a user can create an album for an event, and add the different photos associated with that event to the album. Thus, the album contains pointers to the locations in data storage where the corresponding files or content items are stored. This way, the user can access the photos related to the event from a single place—the album—by accessing the pointers, without having to browse through different folders and/or interfaces where the specific photos are stored, and without having to navigate through photos that are not related to the event.
However, as time passes, the user can manipulate or rearrange the photos and folders that store the photos, moving and copying photos, and adding and deleting photos from folders. But many times, the user forgets to manually update the album to reflect the changes made to the photos and/or folders. Moreover, the albums do not automatically update themselves based on the changes and, therefore, fail to preserve album data when the user makes such changes. Accordingly, these changes to the photos and/or folders cause the album to break or fail to load/display all of the album data that the user expects. For example, the user may create an album based on photos in a first and second folder. The user may subsequently move a photo from the first folder to a third folder. If the user does not manually update the album to change the location of the photo from the first folder to the third folder, the album will not be able to find and display the photo, as it will continue to look for the photo in the first folder. As a result, the album will break or, at a minimum, fail to load and display the moved photo. And as the user manages a greater number of photos, folders, and albums, it becomes increasingly difficult to update the albums to preserve the album data.